Ubuntu 9.04 for Netbooks

Couldn't see a thread on this yet, but Ubuntu has just officially released its new distro version 9.04
What's cool is that they've made a "Netbook Remix" version, which has been tested on a variety of netbooks, including yours truly, the Acer Aspire one.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/u ... y_released

---From the Ubuntu Site---
Works well for most things, sound, webcam, ports all reported to work correctly. Minor problems include pulseaudio interfering with sound recording, and media card reader issues unless it is booted with a card in the slot.

Known issues:
335843 - media card reader not hotpluggable on acer aspire one
354620 - Recording from microphone stutters when pulseaudio is running

 

There is a thread about it there:

Code:

[url]http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=12298[/url]

but its on the release candidate I think. Now that it is an official release, it is nice to start afresh with a more relevant thread. I don't know anything about Linux, I have kept running Win XP on my 8gb SSD AA1, waiting for the official release of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and now I will have lots of questions.

I have tried it yesterday for a couple minutes as a live version off the USB key and so far I am quite impressed. The wifi light does not work but wireless networking does, so i guess it's a minor glitch.
Does anyone know whether it is possible to easily have a dual boot of WinXP and UNR? Also which file system should I use - Ubuntu seem say ext2, but some users say ext3 and others ext4. Very confusing...

 

I have been trying it out with a Live USB session and am planning to install it in the coming days. I still have a number of questions though:

- is there a reliable workaround for the SD card issue ?
- what are the pros and cons of ext4 vs ext2 on an SSD ?
- what is the best way of implementing fan control ?

Any thoughts gratefully received.

 

I'm looking to ditch XP as it is a dog on my AAO for some reason. I've done all the tweaking and tuning I know and can't seem to be all that responsive. I'm thinking of moving to Linux, but have very little experience with them. It's nice to know they made a netbook remix, I'll check it out.

 

sound > try alsa driver instead pulseaudio
wifi led> install linux backport package
sd card> modified the grub menu.lst for more info look wiki ubuntu

 

I've done a fresh install of 9.04 UNR and added fan control via the acerhdf_kmod kernel module. (This is the only real change I added to the default install). My impressions are generally quite favourable though I am getting an issue with full screen video using totem and my TV as an external monitor. After about an hour or so the screen will blank and the only way I've found to get it back is a suspend/resume cycle. I never had this problem with 8.10 where I've watched 3 hour movies with no issues.

 

The Ubuntu wiki suggests that this solution causes problems with resume from suspend. Do you confirm this ?

 

Having never dabbled with Linux before, decided to give this a shot. Running live from USB left me with a good enough impression for me to go shrink my partition in Vista to make room for it. Installed to HDD just fine and even likes my network printer without any fuss.

As a whole my experience has been pretty good. Was annoyed fiddling around trying to get Flash to work on Firefox on it. Flash installer complained about a libcurl3 requirement and libcurl3 didn't want to install on it's own. After running an update to get Firefox to 3.0.9, libcurl3 decided to behave and properly install which in turn allowed the Flash installer to run. Kind of annoying but I managed to fudge my way through it. It's hard to use about half the internet without Flash after all.

I probably would have liked to have kept the default Vista launcher to choose OS instead of Grub since I have no idea how to modify Grub to make Vista the default. Oh, and the necessity for passwords just to save my wifi encryption to some weird keyring? What's up with that?

 

Boot loaders - Windows bootloader primary - this is an issue because MS don't believe there are any other opertating systems in teh world, so their boot loader does not suport booting anything other than Windows, however you maybeable to use WUBI to have Ubuntu run from a virtual disk partition that resides in a file on the NTFS drive. I have not tired this on flash drives, so performance may suck.

The other options is waiting for Windows 7. This will allow you to boot virtual disk images from MS's virtual platform, so I guess one of these could be a linux distro 8)

For myself, I'm going to try to get the test image to boot from one of the SD cards or just try the live CD from my USB CDROM.
Already happy though with 8.04, so unless there is some must have feature (haven't seen anything compelling yet) then I'll just stay on Hardy.

 

A key difference between the two operating systems is with windows you download executable program installers if you want programs. With Ubuntu's hefty sofware repositories the add/remove programs dialogue actually adds programs. There's a package named "restricted-extras" which will install most of the goodies you're after. Flash, java, video codecs, etc.

 

Hi, Currently have Crunchbang installed, but thought I'd give 9.04 UNR a try, but can not get it to install. When I select the install or the "try" option I either get to a black screen, or the command prompt starting with (initramfs).

Currently downloading the the desktop image, and will try that.

Any ideas ?

Cheers.

 

I downloaded the final version of unr and have tried running it from a usb stick. It works but the unr launcher package keeps crashing, usually when trying to open nautilus from the right hand shortcut menu. I did once open home but it crashes so frequently to be unusable.

I ran the 'check media' option from the boot menu and it reports 1 file to be bad but doesn't tell me which file so I don't know whether it is relevant or important. I have checked the md5sum of the downloaded image and it is ok and I have tried writting the image (using the ubuntu usb-imagecreator) to 2 different usb pens with the same result.

 

I had that problem using unetbootin. Try these instructions:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UNR#Writing the Image

 

Can't get wireless with WPA2 PSK to work when running from the USB stick. I've always had wireless issues with Ubuntu. I'm too scared to install it if the network isn't going to be there - kind of defeats the purpose. Anyone else had this problem? It detects the SSID just fine, but won't connect after I enter the password.

 

I installed it along side of my Windows XP last night and it works very well, however, (there is always a however) now I can't boot into XP. It shows up in the Grub menu but will not boot, it just says "starting up" or something like that and just sits there forever. Any ideas?

 

Help!!!

X crashes randomly on my AAO, so I have to press and hold the power-button to shut it down.
I have installed the older xserver-xorg-intel-2.4 and chosen UXA as accelator, but there are still freezes from time to time.

Has anybody xserver freezes too?
(And found a solution for this?)

Floyd

 

Is there an alternative install for the netbook remix like the desktop version? I am seeking to do AES encryption of /, the alternative install makes this relatively easy.

 

I know absolutely nothing about Linux and I have now a perfectly working dual boot UNR and XP on the 8gb SSD AA1, so I guess I must be just lucky. Here what I've done:

-start Ubuntu as the live version, only then go to' install' and properly install it on your hard drive

-use the manual partitioning option:
for the 8gb ssd i reduced the XP partition to 3.25gb (select 'do not use this partition')
swap partition is 2gb as a logical drive
Ubuntu partition (root or '/') is 2.75gb primary in ext2 file system (ext3 will be very slow and using ext4 has 3 billion known problem)

comments:
+
I haven't had any problem with wireless and internet access on the live version
I have installed Opera as well as all mp3 & mp4 codecs in a blink and i am going to watch Mummy 3 Xvid on Ubuntu in a mo!
the graphic interface and the amount of softwares packages included in UNR are mind blowing!

_
the install version seems to forget which is my default network after boot up
the wifi led doesn't work but I've read about a fix on the web
the system is slightly sluggish altogether
that's it for the negatives!

If it turns out to really be that good, I might eventually get rid of XP on my AA1!..

 

Lucky you. I can not do that as I'm using to many typical windows applications...

Does not have to be that massive if you have min. 1GB of RAM. I use 1GB Swap and is more then enough...

Looks like this LED does not work only with Atheros card. Intel card in my AA1 works perfect w/o any problems.

No - you're just willing to read and learn...

 

I completely hosed my AAO with UNR 9.04. I really liked it but I was never able to boot into XP again, so using Super Grub I managed to totally mess things up and am having to reinstall XP only this time I'm putting XP Pro on. Somebody had a package with all the drivers in one Zip file for Windows XP, does anybody remember where to get it? any help would be appreciated.